It's a remarkable story. Still rugedly handsome at 71, the Los Angeles-based Australian, speaking after an American Cinematheque event in his honour, starts by revealing the audacious way he got his licence to kill after Sean Connery quit the Bond films.

“They had tested 300 actors on film but no one had what Connery had, that self-assurance with women, but I certainly did. I’d been a model, had just hit London in the Swinging Sixties and was having a great time playing around with the girls there. I was always running around with a grin on my face.

George Lazenby with Mona Chong and Jenny Hanley on location for Bond in Switzerland

“An agent I knew, Maggie Abbott, told me where the Bond auditions were happening so, with nothing to lose, I got my hair cut short like Connery, bought a Rolex watch and a nice suit and showed up there. I wasn’t on the list so waited until the receptionist checking people in ducked under her desk and then ran past her into the audition room.

“The casting director, Dyson Lovell, said: ‘Who are you’? and I replied: ‘I hear you’re looking for James Bond’. He asked me to tell him my life story so I made up this tale about having made movies in Russia, Germany and Hong Kong when in fact, and contrary to what you might have read, I’d never acted before.”

I got my hair cut short like Connery, bought a Rolex watch and a nice suit

Next thing he knew he had the part. “This was way out of my league,” recalls George.

He received one acting lesson before filming, from Radio Caroline boss Ronan O’Rahilly, who was quickly installed as his manager, and then it was off to shoot 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, in which James Bond battles Blofeld, played by Telly Savalas, and falls in love with and marries Tracy Di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg).

The film was directed by Peter Hunt who took an instant dislike to Lazenby and soon gave up talking to him. “That’s total truth,” laughs George.

“He wouldn’t speak to me throughout filming. He passed information and notes for me via other people but I didn’t know the director had to talk to the actors so it didn’t matter to me.

“At his birthday party I was sitting with the film’s producer, Harry Saltzman, who had got him a mink coat as a present. When Peter walked in and saw me there he walked straight out so Harry said: ‘I guess this is for you then’, and gave me the coat.

“That’s how Peter was with me, even after filming ended.”

Co-star Diana Rigg wasn’t impressed with George either due to him seemingly being more interested in bedding as many beauties as he could during filming than acting.

“Diana Rigg was a tough nut. She tried to control me. She said: ‘If you don’t muck around with all those girls we’ll get on fine’, but my head was all over the place.

George Lazenby with Diana Rigg in a scene from OHMSS

“I was surrounded by all these gorgeous girls, the kind who wouldn’t talk to me when I chatted them up in nightclubs. But suddenly I was James Bond and you can imagine what that did to me. I don’t want to brag but I had at least one girl a day.

“There was a tent on set where the stuntmen used to keep the mattresses they fell on in fight scenes. It was a good place to take a chick if you were in a hurry. Well, Diana looked in there once and that was the start of us not getting along well.”

But Telly Savalas did take to George, especially when he found he could relieve him of his earnings. “I’d been given thousands of dollars of spending money and it was all piling up in my suitcase. Telly saw this one day and asked: ‘Wanna play poker’? Well I’d never played poker and started losing. Saltzman put a stop to it and told Telly: ‘Leave my boy alone’.”

George was having a great time playing the 007 character because having trained as a sniper in the Australian Army he was comfortable around guns and he could also handle the action scenes with ease.

“I did my own stunts and fight scenes, which the other fella [Connery] certainly didn’t do. I also enjoyed speaking to the crew. I’d been a mechanic and a car salesman. I was a working man so I related best to them.”

He felt his best acting came when shooting the final scene of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as James Bond cradles his new bride in his arms just seconds after she has been shot dead. “I cried in the first take but Peter Hunt didn’t like that and wouldn’t use it. He said: ‘James Bond doesn’t cry’.”

Although history has perhaps been harsh on George and several critics have mocked his efforts, the makers of the Bond films were very pleased with how On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a box office hit, turned out.

They offered him a big money contract to stay in the role for years but in one of the most ill-advised decisions in showbiz history, Lazenby turned down the part believing there was no future in the Bond franchise.

HE SAYS: “My manager, Ronan, advised me: ‘Bond is over, finished, anyway its Sean Connery’s gig and you cannot match that guy. We’ll make other movies’. I listened to him. I thought he knew what it was all about but I was dumb. I missed out on everything.

“After On Her Majesty’s Secret Service I took off for 15 months to get away from the publicity. I went with a girl to Sicily on a catamaran, despite not having had a sailing lesson in my life.

“On my return the film work didn’t work out. Money got so short I went back to live with my mother. Nobody believed I had no money after James Bond but that’s what happened.”

He had been set to make a major martial arts movie with Bruce Lee only for Lee’s death to put an end to that.

George says he came up with the idea for TV series The Equalizer but didn’t get credit for it and lost the title role to Edward Woodward.

He picked up occasional guest roles in TV shows, appearing in episodes of Baywatch, Kung Fu, Hawaii Five-O and Knight Rider, provided voiceovers, took acting parts parodying his Bond role and his most steady work came when appearing in several racy Emmanuelle movies in the early Nineties.

At one point he was even Russell Crowe’s landlord. “Russell lived with me for three months when he didn’t have any money and we had the same agent.

“He kept auditioning for jobs in LA but not getting hired because he kept doing the parts in an Aussie accent. I said: ‘You’ve got to do an American accent’, and he replied: ‘They didn’t ask me’. Now he’s a huge star but isn’t talking to me.”

Lazenby is divorced from his second wife, tennis ace Pam Shriver, with whom he has three young children, including five-year-old twins who started school in LA last week.

“I’ve got an ex who wants to kill me but the kids make me happy and life is good,” says George, still a happy-go-lucky guy with a charming manner and a refreshing honesty about his own failings.

He might have been off the mainstream scene for a long time but we are going to be seeing a lot more of him in future.

He explains: “I’m going to write my memoirs and also there’s a planned documentary about me. It’s about time I got off my arse and did something.”